The first complete collection of the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century" (John Berryman). When Delmore Schwartz published his first short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” in Partisan Review in 1937, he became an instant literary celebrity. After the appearance of his first book (by the same name), he was inundated with praise. The famed poet Allen Tate wrote to him, “Your poetic style is beyond any doubt the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound,” and T. S. Eliot himself wrote Schwartz a letter asking him to compose more poetry. The brilliant start of his career is matched perhaps only by its tragic end, a lonely death after an extended period of alcoholism, depression, and derangement. Today, more than fifty years after his death in 1966, Schwartz is often remembered for the tragedy of his life rather than for the innovation and sad brilliance of his greatest work. This book brings together all of Schwartz’s poetry for the very first time, from his groundbreaking debut collection to his unpublished late work, which he kept writing until his death. Accompanied by Ben Mazer’s illustrative notes and introduction, The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz offers readers the long-awaited opportunity to rediscover one of the most influential and original poets of the twentieth century. As Mazer writes in his introduction, “It is the poems that count now. And it is the glory of the poems that survives here, awaiting new life.”

Taking as its starting point Delmore Schwartz's self-appointment as both a 'poet of the Hudson River' and 'laureate of the Atlantic,' this book comprehensively reassesses the poetic achievement of a critically neglected writer. Runchman reads Schwartz's poetry in relation to its national and international perspectives.

To honor FSG's 75th anniversary, here is a unique anthology celebrating the riches and variety of its poetry list—past, present, and future Poetry has been at the heart of Farrar, Straus and Giroux's identity ever since Robert Giroux joined the fledgling company in the mid-1950s, soon bringing T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop onto the list. These extraordinary poets and their successors have been essential in helping define FSG as a publishing house with a unique place in American letters. The FSG Poetry Anthology includes work by almost all of the more than one hundred twenty-five poets whom FSG has published in its seventy-five-year history. Giroux's first generation was augmented by a group of international figures (and Nobel laureates), including Pablo Neruda, Nelly Sachs, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky. Over time the list expanded to includes poets as diverse as Yehuda Amichai, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Grace Paley, Carl Phillips, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, James Schuyler, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, James Wright, and Adam Zagajewski. Today, Henri Cole, francine j. harris, Ishion Hutchinson, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko, Valzhyna Mort, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Frederick Seidel are among the poets who are continuing FSG's tradition as a discoverer and promoter of the most vital and distinguished contemporary voices. This anthology is a wide-ranging showcase of some of the best poems published in America over the past three generations. It is also a sounding of poetry's present and future.

In the tradition of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, but also fiercely original, these five verse plays mix autobiography and history, myths and ghosts, fantasy and comedy in thematic dramatizations of alienation, loneliness, Faustian bargains, and American materialism by a major American poet of the twentieth century.

Leon Surette's new study of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, The Modern Dilemma, challenges the received view that Stevens' poetry expresses a Humanist world view, and - more surprisingly - documents Eliot's early Humanist phase when Eliot and his bride shared Bertrand Russell's tiny London flat, and later rented a country house together (1914-17). Eliot's poetry of that time - up to The Waste Land is seen to reflect his Humanist phase, closed by his conversion, poetically documented in Ash Wednesday. Where Eliot's poetry is dominated by cultural, religious and philosophical angst, Stevens' is bright, witty, and playful - and commonly dismissed as superficial. The Modern Dilemma challenges this view, demonstrating the seriousness of Stevens' life-long engagement with the modern dilemma of disbelief, and also that, like Eliot, he rejected the Humanist resolution, characterized by Russell in "The Free Man's Worship" as man worshiping "at the shrine that his own hands have built." The study proceeds by juxtaposing the two poets' responses in poetry and prose to the same texts and events: Marianne Moore's poetry; the Great War; Humanists and anti-Humanists; the Franco-Mexican Humanist, Ramon Fernandez; Pure Poetry; and finally the gathering war clouds in the late 'thirties. The strategy is to put the two men in juxtaposition so as to highlight the differences and similarities of their responses to the same issues or the same works. Among the issues under examination is the nature and status of poetry, religious belief or disbelief, and political engagement or the lack thereof.